ABSTRACT:Service licensing enables broader usage of services and a means for designing business strategies and relationships. A service license describes the terms and conditions for the use of and access to a service in machine interpretable way. The concept of preserving certain rights of the owner and presenting certain rights to consumer, addressed by Service Licensing, is incipient in service oriented computing. We conceptualize service licensing and propose a family of licenses for services, in human readable form and machine interpretable form. We propose ODRL-S, a language for exclusively expressing service license clauses.

Services rely on other, existing, services for the provision of needed functionalities. In order to build complete applications it is then necessary to find services offering the needed operations, and the details of invoking them. As a part of this activity, there is the need to consider if the proposed services are suitable for use according to their non functional aspects. We propose to integrate licensing aspects as a part of this discovery and selection process.

As composition is the common denominator in service oriented computing, service licensing requires a comprehensive analysis on composition of these rights and requirements conforming to the nature of operations performed and compensation of services used in composition. We describe a novel compatibility analysis process for matchmaking of candidate service licenses (at license clause level) in composition.

The concept of 'everything as services' heralded by the cloud paradigm has made licensing more challenging and makes the relations among providers and consumers more complex. We will discuss some of the guidelines for consumers what to look in a cloud license and recommendations to a service provider what to include in a cloud license for attracting and retaining consumers.

BIO:G.R. Gangadharan is a researcher at Telematica Institute (Novay), The Netherlands. His research interests are mainly located on the interface between technological and business perspectives. Gangadharan's research interests include service oriented architectures, cloud computing, Internet software engineering, enterprise information systems, intellectual property rights, and free and open source systems. Gangadharan is codesigner of ODRL-S, a language for describing service licenses. He has a PhD in information and communication technology from the University of Trento (Italy), an MS in Information Technology from the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (Italy), and an MSc in computer science from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University (India).